


The Spaces Between

by certaintiescertainly



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: AU, M/M, Monster sex, NSFW, Reaper76 Reverse Big Bang, Reverse Big Bang Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-09
Packaged: 2019-01-31 07:27:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12677193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/certaintiescertainly/pseuds/certaintiescertainly
Summary: "Alone, you were the perfect soldier. Now, together, you are nigh on unstoppable."Morrison, Reyes, and the monsters within and without.





	The Spaces Between

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic for Oricalcon's absolutely lovely piece created for the Reaper76 Reverse Big Bang, 2017! 
> 
> I was absolutely floored with the piece I got to write about, and I hope my enthusiasm shines through even a little! Go look at the painting, seriously. It's amazing. [Here it is.](http://oricalcon.tumblr.com/post/167317877655/im-so-excited-to-finally-present-my-piece-for-the)
> 
> And thank you for checking out my work! I hope you enjoy weird monsters who LOVE EACH OTHER as much as I do!

You consider mortality. All men do. All men feel their lives rushing from them, water in a fist. Youth is not immune to the consideration, and age bends around it. Have you defeated mortality? It is the dream of all those men.

 

You consider sins, and costs. You’ve paid dearly, and yet, there will be more to pay for. Synthetic limbs bow and flex, seamless, the pain of their construction a sharp-edged memory that even now leaves a sour taste. It’s fresh. Your chest pulses, and the edge dulls a little, warmth suffusing you. You swallow, you sigh. Rise from your prone position, pulling away from fabric you don’t really feel anymore. Not in the same way.

 

You’ve stopped running, for now, but you find yourself stymied. The perfect weapon, and nothing to aim at.

 

Maybe you should have stayed.

 

No. Those thoughts are dark, and twist in your mind even as you reject them. There was nothing to be gained by staying, and everything to lose. Talon would have aimed you, to be sure, but at innocents. Everything you once stood for would have crumbled to ash, in your hands. By your hands. Now, at least, you have some autonomy. As much as any man has, when he must bend to needs of the body. Food, water, shelter. You still need those. Even a monster, a _weapon_ , needs those.

 

That’s not to mention the needs of the mind. Safety, companionship. A clean conscience. These comforts are wholly denied you. None would dare approach you, anymore.

 

But there’s a pulse, in your chest, and you are reminded that maybe you judged too harshly. _Yes, you old fool, you have_ . You breathe in, filling mostly-organic lungs, and feel the taste of metal and oil and something undefinable, but more pleasant than either of the former, coat your tongue. You know that taste, knew it before your end, your unnatural new beginning. It is the taste of _Reyes_.

 

If Talon picked up your pieces and remade them, then they took the pieces of Reyes and dismantled them further, to see how far they could go. He called to you from within glass tubing, tugging at your very being. And you freed him.

 

Alone, you were the perfect soldier. Now, together, you are nigh on unstoppable. He settled under your skin, as soon as he was free from his glass prison, and so the two of you exist in tandem. Maybe, you surmise, this was intended from the beginning. Gabe rejects the idea. He had longer, to hear them, to plan. He was, before the experiments failed, among their leadership. You trust him, implicitly. Maybe you shouldn’t. But you do.

 

(Do you have any other choice?)

 

No thoughts are private, anymore, and he laughs at you for that one. _Poor Jack, with a ghost as his best bet._ Not a ghost, not exactly. _Close enough._ You smirk to yourself, and if he could match the expression, he would. If a smirk could be a feeling, Gabe certainly imparts it. The two of you are a hell of a pair, that much is certain. Of the two of you, it’s obvious who got the raw end of the deal. One of you has form, has command of a body, however warped, perverted from nature. The other was not so lucky. And yet it is he who comforts _you,_ in these moments. He who dulls the bladed thoughts. You are infinitely stronger for the change. Any weakness, of mind or of body, that could be imagined, he will compensate for.

 

You stretch your arms in front of you, bounce on the balls of your feet. No warm-up is necessary, anymore, but human habits cling to you like so much dross, and you haven’t shaken very many of them at all. And you ought to get moving, really. Shake off these dark musings, and face the day.

 

First, a proper perimeter check. This is done in barely minutes as you ensure everything is working correctly, and that you can successfully get a visual on the entrances and exits to the tomb you’ve hidden in.

 

Maybe not the most respectful of hiding places, but you hope the dead won’t begrudge your need to conceal yourself from the living. You know the Shrike is based nearby, judging by their movements, their hits. The two of you have come to something of an understanding, even without meeting. You both have suspicions about who the other really is, you think, but it shouldn’t be touched. Not yet. For now, you are Soldier 76 and the Shrike, and you have mutually agreed to haunt the dead places of the world until... something better comes up. Hopefully.

 

And haunt you do. Days pass this way, checking and rechecking, looking for Talon movements, finding backdoors into databases, wiping digital fingerprints off the glass as you steal and leave. You’re not Sombra, but you can talk to machines in impossible ways, now, interfacing with software that as far as it’s concerned has only found a slightly more complex subroutine piggybacking off of it for a distance before its gone. It’s not hacking so much as just striking up conversation to distract from your sleight of hand.

 

Days pass, sometimes, when you’re following Talon’s trail, and thus the importance of a secure base of operations is illuminated. It is simpler, but not easy, bouncing through machines like you do, while still trying to maintain a sense of...self. A biological clock. Things like that. Mostly, it’s Gabe who pulls you out when you need to refresh, eat, clean up. Your impressions of an Omnic are enough to unnerve him, this you know.

 

(Not even an Omnic, maybe. Something less. Something that must be guided, and cannot compute on its own.)

 

It’s after a….period of this, something like two days, maybe more, maybe less, that Gabe insists you get air. You comply, and as you step away from your computers, you immediately feel why this was needed. The machine was routines and subroutines, and you do a damn good imitation of a machine, but it is vital that you don’t let yourself become one.

 

But after you’ve cleaned up, something else occurs. _Wait._ And there’s a bent to the thought, a flavor to it. You grin to yourself. And then get all the air pushed out of you with the image that he conjures. You, on the bed, splayed and gasping as you’re filled, stretched wider, wider…

 

_We’ve got time?_ Yeah. Yeah, you’ve got time. You’d _make_ time, for that. He laughs in your head, and it’s almost as good as hearing it in person. _Good. Now, on the bed, soldier._ Even if you weren't so thoroughly conditioned to duck down and obey that tone of voice, you would do so for him. You sit down, then lie on your back, shifting with one hand beneath you to get to the center. There, you take a breath, and stretch your legs out, spreading them as you hear a laugh in your head. _So eager?_ Oh, like he isn't. That gets another laugh, and this one's richer, fuller. Almost truly audible, you think.

 

When you were...rebuilt, there were a handful of things that were deemed nonessential to function. Most notably, any kind of sex organ. There’s just a flat plane from your pelvic bone down, in spite of everything else being almost entirely accurate to your original form. You’re almost positive that they just didn’t want to waste their greatest minds on a way to let their supersoldier get his rocks off. Nonessential function. You curl your lip at the thought. Joke’s on them, really, because you still have your own mind, and, more importantly, you have Gabe, and between the two of you, you make it work. Very well, in fact. Turns out, you don’t need the physical thing to have an orgasm. It takes some more doing, sure, but you’re both up to the challenge.

 

Speaking of being up, and taking some doing…it’s not easy, exactly, for him to manifest physically, and you shiver at the strangeness as black tar-like liquid begins to pool between your legs. It feels like it’s being pulled from your core. That substance also races along sensitive inner thighs, and you laugh, under your breath, as the same sensation tickles your abdomen, your sides, like hands against your skin. He could play you like a Spanish guitar even with just the two physical hands, but now, with your whole system to manipulate, it’s on the edge of too much all the time. You arch, and shiver again, as you feel him run along your back, to your shoulders, and it’s then that he chooses to slip _inside_. The stuff coalesced into something a little more solid, with more give than a finger but no wider or longer than one. Just one. He's teasing you. You groan. You no longer have a bundle of nerves to tease, but that's alright, because he _is_ those nerves, now, and so, right where it should be, you can feel him push up against your inner wall, and it feels just as good as it did before. Maybe better. He doesn't tease long, as impatient as you yourself are, and you can feel the substance thicken, to two fingers, then three, then...oh. Now it's a stretch. He reads your desires plain as if they were in neon letters above you, and you can feel it lengthen, too, until you're at your comfortable limit. It doesn't have the limitations of a physical organ, or even a toy, and so it follows the contour of your innards, more comfortable, more _satisfying,_ than anything either of you were capable of before.

 

You open your mouth to groan again, but this time he catches you by the gums, and that same flexible substance coats your mouth. It tastes like him, like home, and your eyes roll back a little as he presses your jaw open, muffling your moan. You can feel him at the back of your throat, but it's too perfect of a fit to gag on...at least, as long as you breathe through your nose, which you do. And as long as he isn’t feeling mischievous enough to make you choke.

 

This is the image he'd sent you. You can't imagine how you look, full on both ends, spread and entirely wanton. And, as you adjust to the sensation, he does as promised, and you moan again, thankfully hard to hear, as he thickens inside you, pulses, seeking to make you squirm, which, you do. He laughs in your head, cooing reassurances right after. _Good boy, good soldier, taking it so well…_ God, that's almost as bad as the actual sensation, and if you had anything to harden you'd be hard enough to cut diamond. As it is, you can feel your face flushing, your breath quickening. You raise your hands to do--something, you're not sure what, and then, there's pressure on your wrists, black manacles that pin your arms to the bed. Fuck, he's going to _kill_ you, and just as you think you can't take more, you feel the pulse, like blood rushing downward, and you look down to see that, yes, he's pulled out all the stops, and you're no longer lacking in equipment, the black stuff sculpted to fit you perfectly, as natural as the real thing would be. It's a perfect replica of your old self, too, as he draws from both his memory and a lifetime of yours to mimic you exactly. You watch as it twitches, leaks against your abdomen, and the sensation rockets up your spine and back down again. Jesus. Now, with somewhere to focus all that warmth and pleasure on, you can feel exactly how close he already has you, and you can also feel him smile. _Don't worry, I’m planning on taking my time._ You shiver, and can feel his pleasure at the way you moan, desperate.

 

He works you up to at least twice the size of anything a normal man could put in you, and it's unbelievably good, to feel the slow stretch. It's hard to hurt you. Possible, but more difficult, with synthetic muscles that clench and unclench around the foreign object filling you. They would still tear, if you worked too fast, and you certainly don't want to have to explain _that_ to a scientist, for many reasons, but, in the moment, primarily embarrassment. Which means that he spends twenty, thirty-something minutes working you up, getting you fuller and fuller. You haven't come yet, but not for lack of trying, your simulated length straining. He's careful to keep you right on the edge, when he lets you get close at all. His own satisfaction is building, and you can feel both of your pleasure, the twin sensations bizarre but supremely satisfying.

 

And then. He starts working you, and it's not so much that he pulls in and out, more that it just...vanishes, or shrinks, and then reappears, rhythmic, pulsing inside you to the beat of your heart, at least, until your heart rate increases (again), and then it's just steady, building him to the same edge you're nearly off of now. You come first, with a gasp, and the twinned sensation you experience  makes him more desperate, thrusting faster, a touch sloppy. It's still a minute or two of you writhing in time with him before he, too, comes, and it's like a loosening, a slackening of everything as he melts against you, inside you, and you groan with him, satisfied.

 

It's only as he pulls back into you, settling back into your system, that you feel the strain it was to manifest outside. He's not exhausted, or he won't be, for long, and anyways, that's mostly normal for post-coitus, and so you settle back against the bed to enjoy the lax, warm feeling you both have.

 

You don’t realize you’ve fallen asleep until the both of you jolt awake. Fuck. You run through a mental checklist, jumping up and cataloguing where things are. Where you left them? Yes. Body’s sound? Yes. No perimeter alarms tripped, no uninvited guests? Nothing. No heat signatures, not breathing, not the whirring sound of machine or the tiny living sounds man makes, all detectable to your hearing now.

 

You breathe again.

 

You cannot afford mistakes. You are far (you both hope) from Talon’s influence, but there is no guarantee that they won’t find you. That they aren’t hunting. You’re an expensive asset, after all. Both of you are. You’ve essentially stolen your body from the most powerful terrorists in the world. And you’re not exactly made for stealth, between the chrome and bright orange. You’ve managed so far. You try to take comfort in that.

 

That, and the fact that they’d have a hell of a time bringing you back in. You’re not sure who they would send to try and match you, but they have Amelie, and Akande, and many others…

 

The one you fear is a splash of red in your vision, and you take a breath to calm the automatic response. It’s not a rational fear, per se. She is no more powerful than the others, she cannot possibly be more powerful than you. But you both separately remember screaming awake on her table. Those things aren’t easily contained, not always. You both used to be able to compartmentalize up there with the best of them, but. But maybe, between the two of you, that ability has decayed, and you were wrong, before, when you thought yourself more than whole. Maybe the two of you together only partly make up a full, rational mind anymore.

 

That’s not so surprising. You’re both monsters, not men anymore. Why should you expect to cling to sanity, when you barely have any of your original _organs_ left? When Gabe doesn’t even have that much, any longer?

 

There’s a surge of energy, like before, but this one more...commanding. _Stop that._ He’s right, of course. Meditating on these things is purposeless, and only serves to send you deeper down into despair, into darkness. Your lips twist into a smile, wry. Another pulse, and you close your eyes, trying to let the thoughts drift away from you. He pulls them away, and when you inhale, he may as well be there, voice firm in command. _Enough wallowing, soldier. We have work to do._ Right again.

 

There’s something in you still loose and a little bit giddy as you step into the sun, and it is your undoing.

 

You’re sent sprawling, and the echo of the shot off of tomb walls is accompanied by sharp pain in your leg. If you had human limbs remaining, it would have just missed causing arterial spray. As it is, you whirl, and the next shot misses, aimed as it was for you to be bent double in agony. You’re on the ground, and you scramble to get off your ass, get to cover. The next shot gets your shoulder. Too slow.

 

Widowmaker earned her name well. But--your mind races--she cannot be the only threat. She’s flushing you out for something else. Akande? His raw strength might rival yours, even now. Even now, that is a dangerous position to be in, wounded as you are.

 

You’re leaking fluid from your thigh and shoulder, clear stuff, slightly more viscous than blood, and therefore slower to make its way out. You aren’t impaired, not by much. Not yet. But you’re out in the open between tombs, and getting to cover is costly--you bob and weave, and there’s another three shots. All near misses.

 

Three fucking shots. You’re practically handing yourself to Talon on a platter, at this rate. You growl, pressing a hand to your shoulder (the left, fortunately--you’re right-handed) and giving it some compression. Oily black goo seeps over the wound, both wounds, and you take a bracing breath. It stings, but then they’re sealed, for now. A stopgap.

 

You take in your position. You’re currently pinned not five feet from your own damn perimeter alarm (how did they get so close and you didn’t know?). It’s safe to assume your base is compromised. You are technically unarmed, no firearm readied. And as long as you stay here, you give Widowmaker time to reposition, scramble over the many crevices and corners that she could set up and take aim in.

 

You picked it because it was defensible, from the inside. But you’re not inside. You feel irritation roil in your stomach--not just your irritation, either. There’s two of you, there should not _be_ such oversights.

 

There’s very little choice. You need cover. You make a break for the entrance, and no bullets follow to mark your trail in the dust. Good. At least your systems aren’t faulty--you locked in on her by sound, and now, you can hear her moving as if she was repositioning right next to you. You can hear her heartbeat, unnaturally calm, to the point of seeming nonexistent, even as adrenalin must light up her veins. Her heat signature is a distraction you ignore as you move.

You’re prepared to face Doomfist. To face goons. Killer Omnics. Maybe Sombra and her crippling traps.

 

You’re not prepared for Moira.

 

And there’s the fear again.

 

Mostly yours, not his--Reyes and Moira got on like a house on fire in the beginning. Even as he degraded, even as her experimentation became more disjointed, more volatile, he didn’t begin to resent her until she had him trapped in glass and metal. A ghost in her machine, before he became yours.

 

But you. You remember pain too well.

 

It makes you freeze, when you shouldn’t. It gives her time to turn, to face you, to smile. “Hello, Jack.” She greets, smooth and easy, like picking up a conversation from moments before, and not acknowledging an enemy that Talon must have been hunting all these months.

 

Your lip curls, and you do the first thing that occurs to you. You lunge for her.

 

You’d registered, on some level, the way she’s rigged up to something with glistening power, but you don’t know what it _does_ until you’re collapsed on the floor and everything is just _pain_ , and you must be writhing, and is that your voice bouncing off the walls?

 

This is more familiar than you are really comfortable with, some distant part of you thinks as nerve endings scream and scream and scream. You feel like you’re being turned inside out, flayed away at, and whatever science this is, you’re suddenly incredibly angry that all it took to down you was, what, some sort of _pain beam?_

 

So much for the world’s finest soldier. Maybe they didn’t salvage as much as they thought, after all.

 

You must black out, because when you wake, you can’t feel your arms or legs, and Widow and Moira are talking. In French, and in low voices. You can hear them, crystal clear, your machinery filling in the gaps of your own rough-around-the-edges grasp of the romance language.

 

“<If he is in pieces, then my job is done,>” Widow insists, and Moira ‘hmm’s, displeased. That explains why you can’t seem to move, then. They must not have noticed you’re back online--lucky for you, there’s no beeping indicator, or anything that they installed. You wouldn’t put it past Moira, though, if she gets a hold of you again.

 

_If, Jack?_ Okay, yes, things look bad. But there’s a way out. There’s the Shrike. _And there’s me_. Yes. You were kind of counting on that. Gabe sighs in your head, and you can taste the long-suffering look he’s giving you. Yeah, yeah. He’s saving your ass again. It’s typical. You’re aware.

He’s a force of his own, and less categorized, less understandable than you are. Less quantifiable. You’re counting on that, and the fact that Moira seems not to have connected his theft to you, else you’d be in much more dire straits, you think. No time to guess at what she knows, though.

 

The lights go out. You keep your own eyes closed--the orange glow will give you away. So you don’t see how Widow’s visor drops, how she starts to scan for threats. Moira hisses a curse, still in French, then barks an entirely unnecessary order. “<Protect the asset!>”

 

You can feel him withdraw from you, and it’s like shedding a second skin--he’s extending himself a great deal. There’s a click, and you can feel your right leg below the knee again--Widowmaker aims, but there’s nothing to fire at. Nothing but you.

 

“<What _is_ that? Doctor?>” Moira has scrambled with her own visor, and she crows in understanding, and switches to English to address you directly.

“Oh, clever, clever, you two! I couldn’t have planned it better! It’s Reyes, he’s inside the Soldier, must be acting as a secondary system--nervous system, most likely. Don’t shoot!” Widowmaker holds her fire, even as you open your eyes, and stand. Moira looks absolutely triumphant.

 

“<Doctor!>”

 

“Don’t shoot!”

 

She’s too excited or too confident to grasp the danger you are to her. And Gabe uses this. Black liquid shoots off of you, strands splattering both of them, and Moira laughs. And then screams, wiping at her face.

 

“Augh, it’s eating--how--?!”

 

You rush them in the distraction, going for the rifle first. The most immediate problem. Widow fires, and it dissolves midair as it hits the stuff extending in front of you, wrapping around you. You are swaddled in the tar stuff, and as you bring your hand down across the rifle’s barrel, it has also given you shining claws that rend metal like paper. She lashes out, but you’re too fast for her--her punch doesn’t connect. Yours does. Right to the temple, with enough force that it cracks her helm, and she’s down. You don’t bother to wonder if it’ll last, or if that jarring crunch and sudden give was her skull, too--Moira is refocused, smiling sharply as she takes aim again, hands outstretched, and now you realize that she’s not using a weapon. She’s transformed her own body into one, same as she did to Reyes, to you.

 

The pain is muted this time as you take the full brunt of her beam. Reyes is taking it, and you can feel _his_ pain, muted from your own body, but the two of you have worked enough together already to know how to cope with the cost of him shielding you, and it doesn’t stop you as you tackle her. She’s no fighter in close quarters. One, two, three punches, and she’s out.

 

Too easy. Gabe almost mocks you for that, with all the hits he’s taken for you, but you feel him hold that back, because, really, he agrees. They weren’t ready. Or, there’s more waiting.

 

You see them on the cameras first, and you have time to get a proper gun this time. There must be a squad’s worth of them, maybe two, and it will be hell getting out. You grin tightly. This, you know, and know well. This fight is already yours.

 

Two days later, you wake up, and roll off of a different bed.

 

You consider costs. You have paid dearly, for survival, both of you have. Exhaustion drags at you both, and while the pain is a fast-fading memory, there is an ache that is soul-deep.

 

There are sins to ruminate on, as well. You both have quite the list--as Overwatch, as Blackwatch, as Talon. And, now. You haven’t stopped taking lives, and, one day, you will have to pay for that. All violence of such nature has prices. As a free agent, you’re in more danger than ever, from any and every government or organization that would rightly see you as an unchecked threat.

 

But that will matter later. You’re in an empty apartment, in Cairo, and with the light behind you, dawn breaking somewhere behind slatted blinds, you feel a pull from inside.

 

Gabriel Reyes is not, by the strictest definition, a man, anymore. He is not the ghost he claims to be, either. You raise your hands, watching the oily black seep out from underneath joints and fibers, and it feels like fingers over your skin, gentle, soothing. You start to smile at the sensation, and then there _is_ a hand, sliding up your chest, made of roiling black that starts to settle into a proper shape.

 

You can, on some level, feel the strain that this is causing, and you start to open your mouth, murmur, “Gabe, you don’t need to--”

 

And then there’s lips at your temple. Soft, pliant. Human. You laugh, and that same hand catches your face, caresses your jaw before holding you against the side of his nose. It’s Gabe. You don’t have to look to know that he’s manifesting in a way you thought entirely impossible, but you do--you can’t stop yourself.

 

It’s wholly him. You’re caught by the sunlight in his hair, of all things, staring openly, and you don’t notice at all that there’s not much of anything below his neck, yet, as he pulls from you and draws himself into his own form. Black goo sluices off of you, through your fingers, bubbling and hardening until there is a man, next to you, and he has scars you don’t remember and ones you do, and there’s still the matter of the way his hands are black and clawed and veins spiderweb his face and neck, standing in sharp relief, and as you look down, the same can be said of his chest, of both delicate places where the skin is thin and where thicker muscle and veins should be.

 

He is beautiful. He is holding you upright, with one arm, and you don’t remember exactly where you became the fainting damsel--

 

He laughs, at that, and his voice is wrong, but it is still his, underneath the wrongness that becoming Reaper made of him. “You were always delicate, Jack, don’t kid yourself.”

 

Strange, such a voice saying such a thing. But maybe your own will sound strange as your mouth forms clumsy almost-words, and you choke out half a phrase, then another, all nonsense. “I don’t--” Then “You were--” then “Can you even--?!”

 

Gabe just smiles at you, and it’s not the sharp grin you remember. His brow is still furrowed in concentration or pain, and you reach to smooth a thumb over it, even as you try to decide what you’re seeing in his expression. Fondness, yes. Sadness, yes. But there’s something else.

 

And then, you feel it in you, too. Like sunlight through the blinds. It’s hope.

 

You meet him without thinking more, and cling to his shoulders as the two of you kiss. It’s exactly as it was. But here, in the present, rather than a memory that grows more and more distant, it is a reminder of humanity. You had thought you both lost that claim, first with what SEP did, and then, you discovered you had even more to lose.

 

But you’ve gained something new. You both smile, and he cups your face. You rub at his shoulders, down his chest. He won’t be able to keep this up long, it’s already dragging at both of you, but in the time you have, you keep kissing him, relishing in the taste. Acrid, oil, and undeniably Reyes. He has such hair, now--a vanity? Something he couldn’t afford with a real form? You push your fingers through it, thick and wavy. It feels real. All of it is so _real_ that you feel you should be crying. You don’t, though. You keep kissing him. It deepens, passionate, and soft, wet noises seem to echo, magnified, in such a quiet room.

 

You consider mortality. All men face death, and you are more sure now that you will, too. Because you are a man. But you will not go alone. Never alone.

 

Never again.

 

The world stirs under a warm sun, and you smile. 


End file.
